I just happend to have my Samson Zoom H2 audio recorder on me because I was coming from band practice with JC Cassis and company, so I was able to capture a high-quality MP3 recording of Ari and Steven’s performance. Unfortunately, it took me a minute to fumble with the recorder in the dark, so I missed the first couple minutes of the performance. Nonetheless, here it is:
[display_podcast]

Update: After getting some critique in class today, I remixed the audio to make the improve the balance in levels between the narration and musical elements and to bring out some important keywords in the narration. The MP3 player and download links below now feature the new, improved version of my experimental audio documentary.

The original post below:

For my audio portrait of Ruby the Elephant, I sought to “paint” a portrait through sound in the same way Ruby painted her paintings with a brush and paint–using bold brushstrokes and vivid colors; abstract, yet struggling to communicate something deeper that cannot be easily expressed. I cut up the narrative structure of Ruby’s backstory, interspersed it the Ruby Baby track, along with my interpretation of what it would have sounded like when Ruby played the xylophone. Thus, cutting, pasting, and rearranging are my parallel techniques to Ruby’s paint splatters. I wanted to honor Ruby by making my portrait of her to sound like how her paintings look.

I presented my final project for Intro to Computational Media today. Building on the work I did with the Musical Typewriter, I ended up making some last minute tweaks to my “musical typeface,” which consists of audio samples corresponding to each letter of the alphabet. Originally I had used all single-hit percussion sounds, but I reworked the alphabet to include short musical phrases or gestures, and brought in wind and string instrument samples for greater musicality and richness. The final version of my Processing program reads a text file and “translates” the text into music by playing back the samples corresponding to the letters of the words as musical phrase “cluster.”

While playing back a text as a song, the Processing sketch also simultaneously displays the word corresponding to the musical sample cluster being played and visualizes the frequency waves of the music on the screen. Refer to the screenshot above.